Harry's Place

Second thoughts

A few days ago I linked to a news report about World Bank president James Wolfensohn's promise to press the bank's board to make loans to countries conditional on meeting standards of human rights. And I wrote:

Isn't this the sort of idea a serious Left should get behind?

Now-- after reading what Daniel at Crooked Timber has to say on the subject-- I'm not sure if it is.

Under the title Ideas which look sensible but aren't, Daniel writes:

“Don’t lend to tyrants” is a good slogan, but that fact is that tyrants are the government of a very large proportion of the poorest people in the world. If anyone is seriously advocating rights-based lending, then they have to look through this list and tell us with hand on heart that they think the world would be a better place without some or all of these projects.

--Tuberculosis control project in China ($104m)
--Rural Water Supply & Sanitation in Uzbekistan
--Nura River Cleanup project in Kazakhstan
--Rural Education project in Peru
--Caracas Slum-upgrading project in Venezuela
--Regional Blood Transfusion Centres Project in Vietnam
--Second Poverty Alleviation Project (mainly microcredit) in Tajikstan
--Multisectoral HIV/AIDS Project in Democratic Republic of Congo
--Earthquake work in Georgia
--Pilot Literacy project in Cote d’Ivoire
--HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis Control project in Djibouti
--National Nutrition Project in Bangladesh
--Urban Natural Hazard Vulnerability Reduction (ie earthquake-proof houses for the poor) in the Wilaya of Algiers Project in Algeria
--Partnership for Polio Eradication in Nigeria
--Emergency Earthquake Recovery Project in Iran

Well, no, I can't honestly say I want all of those projects eliminated because they happen to be in nondemocratic countries.

Daniel continues:

The principle that “human rights are good business” is already observed by the World Bank in many ways; you may notice that Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Korea, Somalia, Zimbabwe (except regional biodiversity programs) and Cuba are missing from the list above. This is because they have no currently active World Bank projects, because the World Bank does not lend in countries where it does not believe that it will be able to retain reasonable control over the funds committed.

That's an important point, which makes the current policy somewhat more palatable. But I hope that in designing and implementing projects in nondemocratic countries, the World Bank makes an effort to empower people in ways that their governments do not. If it can't force governments to democratize, it can at least plant a few seeds.

A shared contempt

In one sense it's hard to blame Indymedia for the antisemitic garbage that sometimes appears on their websites. After all they do have a policy of allowing anyone to post anything.

But perhaps a more important question is what attracts these antisemites to nominally left-wing sites like Indymedia (and Medialens) in the first place. And I think one attraction is the steady diet of anti-Zionism and Israel-bashing. If participants at these sites have such an intense and single-minded hatred for the country that is home to almost half of the world's Jews, the antisemites reason, why should they have a hard time believing theories about Jewish world domination and the Holocaust-that-wasn't?

The fact is, the dividing line between far left and far right is getting blurrier all the time. Even a cursory glance turns up links to one another's websites-- especially those obsessed with Israel. And it's hardly unusual to find people moving from one extreme to the other in a single ideological jump.

After all, despite their differences the two extremes have one overwhelming thing in common: their utter contempt for liberal democracy.

Some DERANGED Rambling with LOTS OF WORDS in CAPITALS

If somebody wanted to discredit Indymedia they couldn't do much better than this

Hat Tip: The Unspeakable Truth via Just Another False Alarm

Worst Album Covers Ever II

Because it's Friday, and because most of us probably could use a smile:

The folks who brought us last year's Worst Album Covers Ever have produced a sequel. Perhaps the less said, the better.

Hastert vs. McCain: no contest

Senator John McCain's refusal to toe the Republican party line on taxes has drawn a breathtakingly insulting rebuke from fellow Republican and House of Representatives speaker Dennis Hastert.

Hastert strongly suggested that McCain-- a decorated combat veteran of Vietnam who barely survived nearly six years in a North Vietnamese prison camp-- does not understand the meaning of sacrifice.

It almost goes without saying that Hastert has never served in the military.

According to The Washington Post:

On Tuesday, McCain gave a speech excoriating both political parties for refusing to sacrifice their tax cutting and spending agendas in wartime. At the Capitol yesterday, Hastert shot back: "If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] and Bethesda [Naval Hospital]. There's the sacrifice in this country."
.....
The nasty exchange between McCain and Hastert began with a comment the senator made at a think-tank conference on the budget deficit on Tuesday. "My friends, we are at war. Throughout our history, wartime has been a time of sacrifice," McCain said. "But about the only sacrifice taking place is that by the brave men and women fighting to defend and protect the liberties we hold so dear, and that of their families. It is time for others to step up and start sacrificing."

Yesterday, Hastert questioned whether McCain is really a member of Bush's party. "A Republican?" Hastert said with feigned incredulity...

McCain retorted: "The speaker is correct in that nothing we are called upon to do comes close to matching the heroism of our troops. All we are called upon to do is to not spend our nation into bankruptcy while our soldiers risk their lives. I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility."

A Republican who puts principle ahead of party-- an increasingly rare phenomenon.

McCain was a strong supporter of the liberation of Iraq, but he understood as long ago as last summer that the Bush administration was badly mishandling the occupation. It hurts to think how much more promising things might be there now if he-- rather than George W. Bush-- had been elected president in 2000.

The Official Launch of RESPECT in Wales:

I wonder how they will spin this meeting into a "massive" event, with a "great buzz" with "people really getting behind us"?

Hat Tip to those fine people at Stop The Coalition.

Video Nazi

Not that anyone here probably needs reminding about the true nature of the British National Party but Tom's got a transcript of an article which showcases their Scottish Region candidate for the Euro elections:

McLean, a married dad of three, loves to convey a sense of respectability among his neighbours in Barrhead, just outside Glasgow.

How do you think he does that ?

He is on film brazenly giving fascist SALUTES to cheering pals, leading racist RANTS and being part of a group of fanatics that gathers around a Ku Klux Klan-style flaming CROSS. McLean, 33-who denies the Jewish Holocaust ever happened-also joins in a song which talks of killing "n*****s".

More Medialens madness

I know I shouldn't keep looking at the Medialens chat forum, but it's as morbidly fascinating as a train wreck.

This is especially so when the chatterers are forced to confront their own beliefs, as in this thread.

DavidD wrote:

I know its from a fairly discredited source, Johann Hari of the Independent, but this review of Galloway's book has made me think twice. I have bought the book and all his quotes seem to stand up.

This is the devastating review which Harry linked to a few days ago. After citing some of Galloway's egregious apologies for Saddam Hussein, DavidD concludes, reasonably enough:

There is some really shocking and disgusting stuff in Galloway's book. What have we ben supporting? I opposssed the war and Saddam. I don't think Galloway did.

To which Eamon Brennan grudgingly concedes:

Given enough time and enough column inches, Hari will occasionally come up with something correct.

But he quickly reclaims his anti-imperialist credentials by adding:

This doesn't mean that he is not a weasel apologist for homicidal imperialism though.

Chris S. responds:

I know very little about Saddam Hussein's regime, but it is hard to figure that it could be much worse than life under the US occupation.

Let's be charitable and call this a failure of imagination. He concludes:

I am a member of the Respect Party, but have no desire to be governed by them. Who would want to be ruled by someone who seeks power?

Not me. I'd much rather be ruled by someone who just waits for power to be thrust upon him.

David Edwards writes:

Is Hari still writing that fewer than 5% of Iraqis say they want Saddam back? Might be time for even him to stop taking those polls seriously. Iraqis have been asked to make their feelings known in a society where they are liable to end up locked up without charge, tortured, sexually abused and killed.

Yes, and we all remember how photos of the vastly worse and more systematic torture, sexual abuse and murder of the Saddam years were plastered on the front pages of every newspaper in Baghdad at the time.

There's more. Hugh explains that Kuwait belongs to Iraq and "always has done until the Brits carved out the then-known oil rich bit and set up a puppet state." So of course we had no business interfering with Saddam's little border adjustment in 1991.

In a rambling response, brcosin calls Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya-- author of the expose on Baathist rule, The Republic of Fear-- a "traitor." And he cites the draining of the marshes-- which drove hundreds of thousands of Iraqis off their ancestral lands-- as one of Saddam's great achievements, one that the dastardly US and UK are now undoing.

Finally-- in an unclear effort to make a point about something in 1991-- brcosin writes that "Lincoln inflicted far more casualties in his aggression on the Confederacy."

Aggression? On the Confederacy? That's exactly how the slaveholding Confederates described the Civil War, and how diehard "southern patriots" describe it today. Those who hated slavery saw it as a horrible, brutal, but necessary war for human freedom.

It's fascinating when these people let their masks slip for a moment, and you get to see what's behind.

Media Studies

Eursoc puts the boot into old media over it's coverage of Iraq:

the traditional media, by and large, have got every phase of this conflict wrong because they have political blinkers on.

Balanced journalism has been put aside and in its place we have the morally superior media class, lecturing and pontificating. Listen to the “we told you so” vocal tones of the correspondents and anchors on the TV as they gloat upon any minor, real or perceived setback.

The BBC and the Mirror certainly paid the price for their decisions to put stories before the truth, but they are by no means the only guilty parties. Eursoc thinks the problem may be structural and industry wide.

In the eighties and nineties the news profession retreated to the newsroom, depleted budgets had cut back foreign bureaus long ago, the entire world’s media had become dependent on a handful of news wires. Experienced hacks who had decades of experience in war zones were shelved and copyright paranoia saw that freelancers were dropped to the bottom of the pack.

These days they rotate out twenty-something year old journalists, fresh from universities with a few years work experience to danger zones without the slightest mental preparation, historical perspective or life experience, they are mostly incapable of forming their own opinion and so just spout the party line. Knee-jerk clichés about Israel and Vietnam are about all they can muster in most cases.

Are you goofing on Elvis?

Is this Andy Kaufman, returning just as he promised? I'd like to think that it is.

As if Galloway wasn't enough

how many more 'controversial former Labour MP's' are standing in the European elections?

Below the Radar

Plastic Gangster asks an uncomfortable question:

Is the price to be paid for Gaddafi acting like a gentleman in the Middle East the turning of a blind eye to his African activities?

and reminds us that in relation to the rest of the continent, specifically Zimbabwe, that:

Libya is not a registered charity. In exchange for Libyan aid - rendered increasingly important given Mugabe's dwindling circle of friends - enormous swathes of Zimbabwean land seized from white farmers have been signed over to the Libyans; the deeds often in the name of one or other of Gaddafi's family members or regime hangers-on. Productive white farmers are being replaced by Libyan absentee landlords.

Update: There doesn't appear to be much in the way of contemporary evidence of Libyan fingers in Zimbabwe's economic pie. My search has produced this article from the Times from August 2002 which does shed some light though not enough to clarify the situation regarding the farms. The most important words in the Times article are "This article is subject to legal complaint" which I suspect means there has been legal activity to restrict reporting on the subject of foreign investment in Zimbabwe. Curiouser and curiouser.

Blogging Ecosystem

The Truth Laid Bear Blogosphere Ecosystem is, according to its own blurb, an application which scans weblogs once daily and generates a list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list.

The Ecosystem is ranked according to how socially developed blogs are. At the top of the tree are the'Higher Beings' which seems to consist exclusively of enormous audience US blogs like Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan; below them come the 'mortal humans' like Tim Blair and Crooked Timber; nearly as advanced but still regretably monkeylike are the 'playful primates' featuring the simian Samizdata and second breakfast eating Buzzmachine.

The next category down is 'large mammals' in which Normblog and Harry's Place represent the UK, as do Dodgeblogium and Natalie Solent. US blogger Michael J Totten is in this category too.

After this come the 'maurading marsupials' - I never knew Peter Cuthbertson had a bill and laid eggs but he does according to this site. London journalist Stephen Pollard is in the same evolutionary branch as is Hansard reading Emily Jones of Hawthorne, California. Don't say yes to the offer of an omelette from any of these people.

Sometimes Times columnist Peter Briffa is in actual fact an 'adorable rodent' which makes me wonder if his thunderer columns shouldn't be renamed.

Still, it's probably better than being a 'slithering reptile' which is the final status of Socialism in an age of Waiting unless they stop basking in the sun and resume the cold-blooded political insults they specialised in.

Below them come the assorted fish, molluscs, worms and multicellular micro-organisms but my eyes went funny trying to see if I recognised anyone down there and I had to give up. Have a look for yourself if you've got some time to kill.

PS Benjamin is clearly just a dollop of sperm at the moment as he doesn't even show up as an 'insignificant microbe'.

Top Tips

Weblog readers - don't pay £2 a week to read the views of Daily Mail columnists online.

Instead simply glance at the first two paragraphs for nothing and guess what the rest of it would read like.

To help you in that process there is of course the Daily Mail-o-matic. Last time I looked the headline was "Will Gays destroy your house?"

Update: Via the same talented people comes: Michael Howard sings The Smiths and other silliness to do with Alistair Campbell and David Blunkett.

Abuse, Hitchens and Rumsfeld

Norm has some things to say on all those topics.

(And yes I know it may be pointless linking to Norm because most, if not all of you, read his blog every day. But, so what?)

Benjamin Blogs!

I can exclusively reveal that cult comments box personality Benjamin Mackie has finally taken our advice and set up his own blog (complete with photo byline no less!)

And what better way to start a blog which promises "Thoughts, cogitations, and miscellaneous meanderings" than with an exclusive interview with George Monbiot?

Welcome to the blogosphere Benjamin.

Then and Now

Something to chew on for those who consider their personal dislike of Blair more important than the real changes in Manchester Gorton described by Labour MP Gerald Kauffman.

When we lost in 1992 I did my usual victory tour of my constituency. People came out of their houses to wave. And I wept - not for my own permanently doomed prospects of serving in a government, but because I could do nothing for the good folk who had just given me a 14,000 majority. During the next five years Manchester Gorton became number one in the whole of England for youth unemployment. Teachers taught in overcrowded primary schools while the rain came through the roof. In Stanley Grove school they taught music on the stairs.

Now, thanks to Blair's Labour government, long-term youth unemployment in Gorton has gone down by 91%. The minimum wage means that women and men do not have to take any ill-paid job that is going; and 450 women have gained jobs through the new deal for lone parents. The new deal for schools has repaired those roofs and added extra classrooms for smaller primary classes. More than £7m has gone into school construction and repair projects in my constituency. The number of teaching assistants has more than doubled. Sure Start schemes for under-fours have been massively funded.

Neighbourhood renewal schemes have transformed the Northmoor Road area, where despair and deprivation ruled before 1997, so that people are eager to move in and are paying £60,000 for houses which, if they could sell at all, were going for £11,000. Every category of health-service personnel has increased substantially in numbers. More than 5,000 are receiving pension credit. The £200 winter-fuel pay ment was paid last winter to 10,625 of my constituents. More than 6,000 are on learndirect courses.

The transformation in the lives of many thousands of my and other Labour MPs' constituents has come about solely because Blair led Labour to two successive smashing victories. And make no mistake about it: people in inner-city and other deprived constituencies, who went on electing Labour MPs during the wilderness years, could never have hoped for these improvements unless Blair, and only Blair, had won over the middle England constituencies Labour failed to win over 18 years.

Poor Yasser

It's just him and his website and his memories now.

(Via MEMRI.)

Meanwhile a prominent Arab journalist-- apparently quite close to Arafat-- has written him an "our dear brother" letter, strongly suggesting he is the main obstacle to a Palestinian state and urging him to resign.

What a gift that would be to the Palestinian people, and to the Israeli peace movement.

(Via Not a Fish.)

...and why they hate Blair, too.

In today's Guardian, David Aaronovitch expounds on the favoured pastime of middle-England conservatives, old Labour troglodytes and useless hacks:-

Blair hating...

Aaronovitch covers the growing leadership 'crisis' (how long can a Prime Minister 'teeter' on a brink? - I make it about 18 months and counting) and compares Blair's tenure with that of Harold Wilson.

He closes by offering his own thoughts on what lies at the heart of the animosity exhibited by irredeemable Blair loathers, citing ‘envy’ and ‘self-recognition’:

Self-recognition is about knowing that the things you said when you were an adolescent and a young adult, that you shouted and railed about, were - many of them - just wrong. And here comes little Blair, who doesn't even seem agonised by the process of dropping the ancient verities, but moves on with no regard to your feelings at all. And the worst of it is your secret suspicion that, by and large, he's been right.

Not for the first time, I find myself in complete agreement with the current 'columnist of the year'.

Why the London media hate Prescott

Listening to the lame attempt to imitate John Prescott's accent on Newsnight last night and noting the general glee of the media whenever Prescott gets involved in a row, led me to revisit a post from the early days of Harry's Place.

The press have it in for Prescott and I think it is pretty clear why - he represents one of the most despised figures of all for the London elite - the blunt Northerner. Worse than that he is a blunt Yorkshireman - and in power.

And that is what the whole of the media's dislike of John Prescott is about.